A man in Hong Kong reads a Chinese-language newspaper March31 leading with reports on North Korean military developments. / Antony Dickson, AFP/Getty Images

by Louise Branson, USA TODAY

by Louise Branson, USA TODAY

Insanity, Albert Einstein once said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that measure, crazy-acting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un - and his father and grandfather before him - is stark raving sane. Doing the same thing over and over has always gotten this communist dynasty the same four things it craves: attention, food, money and power. It is the rest of the world that better fits Einstein's truism. The rest of the world has tried the same responses and hoped for different results. The only way to change that is for the world, China in particular, to do something completely different.

Crazy-but-sane Kim Jong Un, though, is simply repeating his family history. The déjà vu stunts were honed by his China-allied "Great Leader" grandfather and "Dear Leader" father. They may have the feel of a wacky Red Scare horror show stuck in the 1950s. But Kim has two reasons to believe they will work. It is not just that North Korea has nuclear weapons, albeit not yet the sophisticated warheads and missiles his propaganda claims can already hit the U.S. mainland. As important: Kim expects China to enable and protect him no matter what.

A closed society

Theories abound about why Kim is behaving like an even more cartoonish version of his grandfather and father. Among them: his father Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, left instructions for how to consolidate power - instructions that counted on China. Few people know for sure. North Korea is a closed, Stalinist state. Apart from the well-fed, pampered elite, its people are starving.

Whatever the reason for Kim's behavior - he says it is because of U.N. sanctions and joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises - the old responses won't change North Korea's behavior. The U.S.-led outside world has repeatedly tried a spectrum of sane efforts. At one end, bribery, appeasement and special U.S. envoys like Jimmy Carter. At the other: sanctions, isolation and six-party talks that rope in the Asian neighborhood. North Korea reverts, always, to being North Korea. Under new, young, inexperienced Kim, the behavior has become exaggerated, alarmingly detached from reality. It has made North Korea an accidental war waiting to happen. That new reality should be the catalyst for China to use its clout.

Beijing has leverage

And China does have clout. Decades ago, China and North Korea behaved and talked in the same Red Scare language. They were, in the words of Chinese propaganda at the time, "like lips and teeth." The North-South Korea divide was, too, a communist-capitalist divide. China has since modernized and moved on.

China's communism is communism in little but name. Its communist leadership is unelected but term-limited, capitalism is the country's religion, the Cold War is over, and China is fast becoming a dominant world power. North Korea has remained the badly behaved brother it can't quite give up on. China still provides North Korea with food and fuel. Whenever China gets tough on North Korea, that toughness is halfhearted.

That must change. China has long been afraid of unrest on its North Korea border. But, with Kim's goading, long-buried tensions and military clashes could erupt anyway. China wants to be a real world power. Real world powers don't opt for stability at all costs.

The new president of China, Xi Jinping, caused a stir in recent days with some cryptic words. "No one," he said, "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains."

In China, where obliqueness rules, those words are a big deal, a Chinese-flavored warning to North Korea. Talk alone, though, as an old Chinese proverb puts it, "doesn't cook rice." China could and should step up to talk reality to Kim and enforce it.

Otherwise, expect Einstein's saying to hold true.

Author and journalist Louise Branson was the Beijing correspondent for the London Sunday Times. She is a former editorial writer for USA TODAY and is writing an international thriller.

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